End of a Philosophy

(from the chapter with that title in Facing Reality: The New Society … Where to look for it, How to bring it closer, A statement for our time—by CLR James, Grace C. Lee & Pierre Chaulieu, 1958)

Fascism, Corporate State, One-Party State, Welfare State, Totalitarianism, all of these are ways in which rationalism attempts to adapt itself to the modern community. Thereby it not only obstructs the new society. It destroys all the achievements of rationalism itself. The free development of the individual personality, the right of the meanest intelligence to wander through the strangest seas of thought, alone if need be, this freedom has been established as a universal principle, however limited it might be by the actual conditions of existence at any particular place or time. It is now an ineradicable part of the human personality. The new society, the community of cooperative labor, can function adequately only if this freedom can expand to its fullest degree. Today rationalism destroys it, not only for the mass, but for the elite itself. So Hitler and Stalin become the sole individuals in their countries en- titled to any personality at all. Political parties in parliamentary democracies become machines in which the individual must either conform or be ruthlessly eliminated. Human associations no longer are guided by leadership, they pay homage to “the leader.” That is why “on both sides of the Curtain—and rapidly developing in Asia and Africa—modern urban, industrial (or industrializing) society renders its citizens ever more rootless in their local habitations, ever more mobile, ever more atomistic. They do not feel their society. They do not seem parts of it.” But a society of Workers Councils in every department of the national life, and a Government of Workers Councils? Ah! That, if you please, will mean—the destruction of culture. As if for fifty years official society has not been systematically destroying culture in its most precious castle—the mind of man. Sometimes some scrap of reality appears for a brief moment among the perpetual stupidity, lies, hypocrisy and self-delusion which the daily Press mechanically places before even its most pretentious customers. Thus the London Times for April 18th, 1957, suddenly informs its readers:

It is, for example, being widely said that the political and industrial conflicts in contemporary Britain arise from the fact that two fundamentally opposite moralities, a bourgeois morality and a collective morality, are flourishing side by side and that their respective adherents find it increasingly hard to discover a common basis for discussion.

It is a peculiar idea that both these societies are “flourishing.” Let that pass. There they are, the two societies. But we read on and it turns out that the bourgeois morality is—Christianity. “Conservative Freedom Pays;” a Prime Minister in the House of Commons, twisting and cheating like a racing tout in the dock, when asked if American planes loaded with hydrogen bombs are flying over England; employers straining like greyhounds on the leash for a government signal to have the showdown with the workers; professors sitting up late over Jung to find reasons why royalty is part of the collective unconscious (British), this is capitalistic society? No such thing. It is Christianity, and the Archbishop of Canterbury is its prophet.